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Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) by Linux fortune

The bone-chilling scream split the warm summer night in two, the first
half being before the scream when it was fairly balmy and calm and
pleasant, the second half still balmy and quite pleasant for those who
hadn't heard the scream at all, but not calm or balmy or even very nice
for those who did hear the scream, discounting the little period of time
during the actual scream itself when your ears might have been hearing it
but your brain wasn't reacting yet to let you know.
                -- Winning sentence, 1986 Bulwer-Lytton bad fiction contest.
4.2 BSD UNIX #57: Sun Jun 1 23:02:07 EDT 1986

You swing at the Sun.  You miss.  The Sun swings.  He hits you with a
575MB disk!  You read the 575MB disk.  It is written in an alien
tongue and cannot be read by your tired Sun-2 eyes.  You throw the
575MB disk at the Sun.  You hit!  The Sun must repair your eyes.  The
Sun reads a scroll.  He hits your 130MB disk!  He has defeated the
130MB disk!  The Sun reads a scroll.  He hits your Ethernet board!  He
has defeated your Ethernet board!  You read a scroll of "postpone until
Monday at 9 AM".  Everything goes dark...
                -- /etc/motd, cbosgd
"Obviously, a major malfunction has occurred."
                -- Steve Nesbitt, voice of Mission Control, January 28,
                   1986, as the shuttle Challenger exploded within view
                   of the grandstands.
"The National Association of Theater Concessionaires reported that in
1986, 60% of all candy sold in movie theaters was sold to Roger Ebert."
                -- D. Letterman
Brief History Of Linux (#17)
If only Gary had been sober

When Micro-soft moved to Seattle in 1979, most of its revenue came from
sales of BASIC, a horrible language so dependant on GOTOs that spaghetti
looked more orderly than its code did. (BASIC has ruined more promising
programmers than anything else, prompting its original inventor Dartmouth
University to issue a public apology in 1986.)

However, by 1981 BASIC hit the backburner to what is now considered the
luckiest break in the history of computing: MS-DOS. (We use the term
"break" because MS-DOS was and always will be broken.) IBM was developing
a 16-bit "personal computer" and desperately needed an OS to drive it.

Their first choice was Gary Kildall's CP/M, but IBM never struck a deal
with him. We've discovered the true reason: Kildall was drunk at the time
the IBM representatives went to talk with him. A sober man would not have
insulted the reps, calling their employer an "Incredibly Bad Monopoly" and
referring to their new IBM-PC as an "Idealistically Backwards
Microcomputer for People without Clues". Needless to say, Gary "I Lost The
Deal Of The Century" Kildall was not sober.
Brief History Of Linux (#18)
The rise and rise of the Microsoft Empire

The DOS and Windows releases kept coming, and much to everyone's surprise,
Microsoft became more and more successful. This brought much frustration
to computer experts who kept predicting the demise of Microsoft and the
rise of Macintosh, Unix, and OS/2.

Nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft, which was the prime reason
that DOS and Windows prevailed. Oh, and DOS had better games as well,
which we all know is the most important feature an OS can have.

In 1986 Microsoft's continued success prompted the company to undergo a
wildly successful IPO. Afterwards, Microsoft and Chairman Bill had
accumulated enough money to acquire small countries without missing a
step, but all that money couldn't buy quality software. Gates could,
however, buy enough marketing and hype to keep MS-DOS (Maybe Some Day an
Operating System) and Windows (Will Install Needless Data On While System)
as the dominant platforms, so quality didn't matter. This fact was
demonstrated in Microsoft's short-lived slogan from 1988, "At Microsoft,
quality is job 1.1".
HR 3128.  Omnibus Budget Reconciliation, Fiscal 1986.  Martin, R-Ill., motion
that the House recede from its disagreement to the Senate amendment making
changes in the bill to reduce fiscal 1986 deficits.  The Senate amendment
was an amendment to the House amendment to the Senate amendment to the House
amendment to the Senate amendment to the bill.  The original Senate amendment
was the conference agreement on the bill.  Agreed to.
                -- Albuquerque Journal
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